Brief bedtime note

My head swap / conversion of a Perry French plastic officer got me motivated to move on with the next stage of my experimental study for the Saxons. I’ve stated painting the little chap as a Saxon musketeer officer after finally making some colour decisions.

Most other armies of the period have plenty of blue, red and green in their uniforms but not many boast the opportunity for yellow (especially in combination with light blue). So I’ve decided to paint this study as an officer of one of the two 1813 Saxon infantry units that had yellow as their regimental colour – i.e. the Prinz Maximillian and von Rechten regiments. This means I’ll be doing a light blue surtout with yellow collar and cuffs plus yellow piping on the turnbacks.

But, as usual, I’ve started with the head. Now that I’ve had a chance to put paint to plastic, I’m convinced that the faces (and heads in general) on the Perry plastics are better than on their metals. This one’s got a nice expressive face with the mouth open as if shouting a command that lent itself to easy paintwork. Plus the bonus of an unsual covered shako that has what looks like a nasty sabre slash in it. The pom-pom is the exact same size as on the the Calpe Saxons and gave me a good chance to practice how I’m going to paint these correctly with the bottom half white and the top half in the regimental colour.

For the yellow I went for a Flat Earth (V983) basecoat followed by Ochre Brown (V856), then Flat Yellow (V953) and lastly Lemon Yellow (V952). A slight change from my previous yellow palette to give me greater contrast from basecoat to final highlight. White is a colour where I’m hoping to find a new, less harsh palette. This time I’m experimenting with a Light Grey (V990) basecoat and working through Sky Grey (V989) and White Grey (V993) to White (V951). It seems to have worked well but that’s possibly a bit presumptive when we’re talking about a total area the size of half a pom-pom! The real test of this palette will come when I get to the trousers.

Anyway, head, cuffs and collars all done – next stop the piping on the turnbacks with some painting technique observations for Von Peter Jnr. And I’ll try to take a half-decent photo or two to illustrate what I’m doing in this study.